A Christian parent has cried foul after his daughter brought home a packet from her social studies class instructing students to practice writing the Islamic declaration of faith in Arabic calligraphy.
Seventh-grade students at Mountain Ridge Middle School in West Virginia were given the 30-page packet earlier this week. Unbelievably, one of the pages “instructs students to practice calligraphy by copying the Arabic form of the Shahada by hand.” The Shahada, as explained by The Christian Post, “is the Islamic profession of faith that declares belief in one true God and Muhammad being a messenger of God.”
Rich Penkoski, a conservative Christian who runs an online ministry called Warriors for Christ, was taken aback when his daughter, Brielle Penkoski, showed him the packet. “I saw the assignment of writing the Shahada in Arabic. Their excuse was calligraphy,” Penkoski said. “I was like, ‘Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!’ First of all, calligraphy was invented in China 3,000 years prior to Muhammad. The fact that they were trying to get my daughter to write that disturbed me.”
Brielle told her father the assignment was mandatory and that she would get detention if she didn’t complete it. Incensed, Penkoski contacted the school’s principal, Ron Branch.
However, Branch insisted that the teacher who assigned the packet, Katherine Hinson, had never said the assignment was mandatory. He wrote in an email to The Christian Post:
“There were two calligraphy activities in the packet. One involving the Shahada and one that is just English letters in which the students can write whatever they want in calligraphy,” Branch explained. “The teacher told the students that they could do these activities if they wanted. I told Mr. Penkoski that the calligraphy activity was optional, but was not assigned. They are reading through the packet as part of the study. The teacher has told her class several times that this is a study of world religions and that she is not trying to advocate for any religion over another. She has told her class that if they had questions about religious beliefs, that those conversations should take place with their parents.”
But Penkoski doesn’t buy the school’s story, citing past assignments on Christianity and Judaism that were mandatory:
“Why would they print all that out and then tell them they don’t have to do it?” he asked. “When they were given a packet [on Christianity], which didn’t go into that much detail, they did have to write an essay. So you’re telling me they don’t have to do it now that I called you on it? It makes no sense and it is not consistent.”
“If it was optional, then why was there no option for comparison for Judaism and Christianity? There was no option to recite any of the Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments. There was no option to write Hebrew,” Penkoski continued. “Why is it only Islam?”
“I am curious why the other ones were not optional and the Islamic one was optional,” he added. “It only seemed to be optional after I raised objection.”
“Let’s be honest, if they had come home with the Lord’s Prayer, we would have atheists suing all over the place,” he added.
Penkoski is right. Even though students also learned about Christianity and Judaism in their class, Hinson crossed the line from “the secular aspect of it to the faith aspect of it,” as Penkoski put it, when she asked her students to copy the Shahada. Furthermore, it’s unsettling that both Brielle’s teacher and her principal would insist that she’s not telling the truth about the assignment being mandatory. Did they really expect Penkoski to believe them over his daughter?
To be sure, it’s important that students learn about world religions. But asking students to copy a statement of faith under the guise of calligraphy is absolutely unacceptable.
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